Analysis and comment from Memphis, Tennessee, on media, politics, culture, science, my life and anything else that catches my eye.

Sunday, July 03, 2005

Fun With Numbers: Google and the Commercial Appeal

Found this column in Sunday's online CA. It only credits a "Mark Watson" as the author, with no other identifying information or contact info. Does the paper version also skimp?

Anyway, it's a brief and superficial look at modern day "invective" that ends with something called "extreme googling." Watson apparently went to Google and did some quick and dirty searches. His results?

Now, I know Google is changing all the time, but look at some of those differences, especially the last one, more than a million hits off. Did anyone at the Commercial Appeal even fact check this before it went to print? How difficult could it be to fact check this? I did it in ten minutes.

I then did some more word pairs. First was to drop the "Party" from the two Republican searches:
Republican + fascist = 581,000 hits
Republican + Nazi = 826,000

Note that the last one is still four times what Watson claims in his column. But wait, there's more!